2dboy’s first release, the much anticipated World Of Goo is very much an indicator of the current state of indie game creation and a validation of the micro-studio as a viable structure for nurturing successful games. They have just released a prerelease version of the PC version, allowing those that have pre-ordered to play through the first chapter of the game, and its a hugely enjoyable experience.

While indie games have frequently been associated with lower production values, this shines with polish. Its charming, playful, refreshing and addictive. They have taken the core mechanic from Tower of Goo (released by Kyle Gabler, one of the co-founders as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project) and extended it into an action-puzzler format within a physics sandbox. Taking a few slices of Lemmings and a dash of Bridge construction set, each level calls for you to coerce various types of goo-ball (each with different properties, such as reusability or being lighter than air) into forming structures to get the other goo-balls to the pipe at the end of each level. It is a genuinely new game mechanic, and as with many indie-games it makes great use of the physics engine (ODE in this case) to create open-ended gameplay.

The game has been made almost entirely by Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Both share design responsibility and programming, with Kyle also producing all of the artwork and music (a true indie renaissance man).

They have made some savvy decisions during the development process. Going for a mouse-driven interface definitely lowers the barrier for entry for casual gamers (and also opens up opportunities for a Wii port, which they currently have underway). Using off the shelf open-source libraries like ODE and SDL cut down development time and make porting to other platforms such as Mac much easier. Rather than handle the Wii port themselves, they’ve brought in another ex-maxis employee, Allan Blomquist, to handle the port, which apparently he managed to get up and running in under a month. Starting off with a PC prototype definitely seems the way to go.

So, definitely inspiring for anyone out there working on (or considering to start) an indie games project. Its a great success story, and updates the 1980s-bedroom-coder phenomenon to a 200x coffee-shop-dwelling laptop-swinging microstudio. Between 2DBoy and Media Molecule, perhaps we’re seeing the start of a new trend in the games industry.

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